**** Puck (Eugene Judd) ****

AlexR

HoundofShadow said:

Finally got this dude champed and I got to say this character stumped me.

I was focusing on triggering his passive destruction and his passive row destruction is a killer-edged sword instead of a double-edged sword. Many a times, his passive row destruction made matches for enemies as well. He got killed quickly due to match damage from champed 5*.

So, I focused on his green power instead and spammed his green power 7 times in a row. It didn't help much because he made matches only 2 out of 7 times.

There's nothing special about his red, besides being a cheap conditional 1-turn stun.

I think he would probably work well in Johnny Storm Puzzle Ops. Theoretically, I was thinking maybe Sersi/Storm could help him. 

Pretty much, yeah. With his green being basically non-functional and his red being whatever, he's unfortunately kinda bottom of the barrel. You will never bring him for his actives.

I would still very much like to try him once against America or Polaris, just to see how his passive fares against them. But his passive making accidental matches for the opponent sounds awful; wasn't aware that could happen.

Logically speaking, Melinda May is probably the best partner for him if his passive triggers. Melinda was released during my hiatus, so I don't have her well covered and can't try it properly. Still, on paper it seems reasonable. He takes a hit large enough for his passive to trigger, she heals him.

AlexR

Okay, so. Returning to this thread much earlier than I thought I would-- I pulled a ton of Puck covers and moved him up in the queue because he's now about to give me a Colossus cover.

All issues we discussed are still the same. However, I now had opportunity to try out this from last page:

@AlexR said:
(...) Puck/4* Black Panther/Magik is the best I can come up with right now to make him do something useful in a team.

This is actually workable. Magik is probably Puck's best partner-- for one, his black is cheap, helps Magik in making some protect tiles and firing it makes Magik add more protect tiles/fortify them. This in turn also means that it's much much easier to get the condition on Puck's red.
(Magik has the better red for sure, but having access to a cheap stun that disables annoying passives for a turn can be situationally helpful.) And it also means that his green isn't completely useless-- sure, it's still broken and unlikely to do anything itself, but firing it will proc Magik. And you get a slight board shuffle that might make tiles more accessable.

Then Black Panther comes in and uses those protect tiles as ammunition. It's certainly not the fastest team (at least it's pretty safe since you're sitting behind a wall of fortified protect tiles) - but also not atrociously slow. Once you're exploding protect tiles left and right, the damage's piling up quickly.
And if a hit is big enough to get through the protect tiles, Puck can tank & fires his revenge AoE back. He should be tanking at least black+green here, if not red as well (depending on levels).

I think that's probably as good as it's gonna get for him: all his abilities may contribute something here. Considering how lackluster his red and the active part of his black are otherwise (to say nothing of his broken green), how few options he has to make a noticeable impact on a battle, that's pretty solid imo.

AlexR

PUCK REWORK HERE.

His kit now works, nothing is broken, so that's a great change. He's still not wowing me though.

First and foremost: the cartwheeling tile-moving passive. This is a great change, both for flavour and to allow him new avenues for synergy. You can now use him with America, for example, and get some extra matches out of it to get ahead in AP a la MEHulk.

However, especially when directly compared to MEHulk, there is one big difference: MEHulk and MThor and the like move/destroy tiles before your turn, so you can take advantage of the change of the board on your turn. Puck on the other hand moves tiles after your turn, so you have no control whatsoever-- you might be gifting the AI a 4- or 5-match, a match in a colour you were trying to deny, etc. So this is a bit of a double-edged sword that might benefit the opponent. And you need him to tank colours to use it. ...Still vastly superior than the nothing of before, though.

I keep his green@3. The boarddestroy itself is okay, but the match damage boost wasn't really that impactful when played with 4*s, imo. At least not enough that shortchanging red or black was worth it. Again, vastly superior to before, because the green now does _something_ useful at least. But as far as green boardshake goes, it's not especially amazing imo.

His black passive is now a small revenge AoE dealt in increments, which in 4* land feels pretty eh. A nice bonus, but not anything to rely on. Possibly this might do more if you ascend him.

Red and black actives are pretty much unchanged. Black makes a few protect tiles just as before. Red does a smidge more damage, but remains around ~4k damage for 6 AP around lvl 280ish. It's feedable, but not great damage/AP wise-- for two firings (12 AP), you don't even get 10k damage. You'll almost certainly have access to better damage abilities in any given boost week.

Team-wise, 4* Magik/ 4* Panther / Puck as detailed above still works the same, nothing changed here. Additionally, his passive matches now allow him synergy with characters that like gaining small amounts of random extra AP (i.e. America) or enjoy board destroy (i.e. Polaris).

tl;dr: He's useable and not broken, yay! I'm glad they fixed him, the fact that his green did literally nothing before bothered me. -- Still wouldn't call him good though. In my own list, I moved him from E (characters that struggle to do anything) up to D (characters that are awkward to use or need specific team support that's not just a battery). Purely on account of the passive tile moving giving him more options and his green not being broken anymore.
Possibly he might be better ascended due to higher 5* match damage, not sure.